Week 48: The Hero Complex – #AlphaFemaleFriday

The subject of female objectifying in the media comes up pretty often on the news, but rarely do we discuss the idea of taking it to the other extreme. Switch it around, and we find ourselves personalizing people where we shouldn’t be personalizing them. There’s this odd trend among teenagers nowadays—how old does that make me sound?—where they, as fans, refer to some celebrities they adore as “mommy” or “daddy”. This got me thinking about the hero complex and how it applies to the business world. This week I’ve been thinking about what it means to take a person and mold them in our own image, even if we do so absent mindedly.

Take your boss at work, or an authority figure that you really admire. Have you ever inappropriately viewed someone as a mother or father figure when you should actually have a wall of separation? I’m all for admiring people and respecting them as more than just an object, which is why the idea of objectifying women is such a terrible practice. However, we need to discuss what happens when we take authority figures or role models in our lives and try to make them something greater than they actually are.

You can look up to your boss, a powerful business figure, or a social entrepreneur who doubles as a pop star celebrity and supermodel all rolled into one, but sometimes we forget that as much as we help make them be greater than just one person because of our unfaltering admiration, we forget that they, too, are mere mortals. People will make mistakes and they will fail, so when we watch our heroes fail, we feel like a part of ourselves is failing.

The original title of this chapter in Lois P. Frankel’s book, Nice Girls Still Don’t Get the Corner Office, was called “Viewing Men in Authority as Father Figures”. Besides taking the men who hold a high place in our lives and making them something greater than just a man with a big title and fringe benefits, sometimes we try to take these powerful figures and imagine them as mother and father figures by proxy. Do not make that mistake.

Cheers,

Kelly

@AlphaFemSociety tweets by @KellyRGonzales

About:

Each week, I take a tip from Lois P. Frankel’s book, Nice Girls Still Don’t Get the Corner Office, and explore how each of these tips affect myself and other women in similar positions on the road to becoming the women we want to be. There are far and few between who are a few steps behind me, and many more who are far advanced. I found that Lois P. Frankel’s advice applied to novice, intermediates, and experts alike. It helped me see that I was already doing right, served as a reminder to keep on doing what I was doing and how to keep that momentum going. The book also showed me areas where I could improve, and gave realistic tips to jump on board. There are a total of 133 tips, and explore one tip per week in a program I call: 133 Weeks to Success.

Join the movement using the hashtag #133WeeksToSuccess with posts which are posted every #AlphaFemaleFriday.